Omer 5769 documents a collaborative performance art piece uniting 9 Jewish women in an act of deconstructive constructivism. Abstract Painter and Performance Artist Doni Silver Simons examines the traditional Jewish approach to time, integral to Jewish memory and cognitive processing, and the profound relevance of the way we count on the evolution of Jewish identity.

OMER 5769, a documentary short by artist Doni Silver Simons and filmmaker Jonathan Skurnik, examines the 7 week period between Passover and the holiday of Shavuot - a period marked by the daily iteration of an oral tally. Each day of the 49-day Omer refines our focus on the unique nature of time and encourages us to seize the moment.

In OMER 5769, Doni Silver Simons has contemporized the ancient theme of enumeration. The viewer is invited to inhabit the Omer’s cycle along with the Strand-Pullers [nine female participants].
The result is an intensely compelling experience, a metaphor for the unravelling of time, the return of the tapestry to the moment of its weaving, while simultaneously marking the presence of Memory.

The film rustles with the whispers of the Strand-Pullers.

We witness the accumulation of consciousness, the affirmation of presence and absence: what has been, could have been, and what is no longer.

OMER 5769 describes the uniquely human condition of navigating the parameters of time.

DONI SILVER SIMONS, born in Springfield, MA. is a painter, installation, and performance artist. She received a Bachelor of Studio Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971 and completed her MFA at Wayne State University in Detroit. Doni Silver Simons has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States, most recently at Sherry Frumkin Gallery (2010, 2009, 2007), at the Slutzky Art Gallery in 2011, and at Hebrew Union College in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Incognito at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2010, 2011 and 2012, Send Nothing to the Tate Modern; A Project by David Horvitz, London in 2010 and FRESH at MOCA in 2009.

Doni Silver Simons’ work is in many private collections and in the public collections of Detroit Institute of Art, University of Michigan Art Museum, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, National Endowment of the Arts and Michigan Council of the Arts.